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Curved is the line of beauty: A short story by Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel

Published: 1 February 2002

B
efore you can speak, even before you take your first steps outside your
house, there is a moment when you are lost or found. It’s a matter of
language, accent, the current of the air, and those accidents that identify
us - or not - with the place, the time, the people around us. There are
places that enclose you and places that leave you scalped by the knife of
the wind; there are places that have “lost” inscribed on them, scrawled over
their grid reference in invisible ink. I have always understood that the
chances of being lost were high, because I was born on the edge of the
moors, and grew up on stories of its murderous ways. Moorland punished those
who were stupid and those who were unprepared. Ramblers from Manchester,
slack-jawed boys with bobble hats, would walk for days in circles, till they
died of exposure; and clammy fogs, like sheets drawn over corpses, would
thwart the rescue parties. Moorland was featureless except for its own swell
and eddy, its slow waves of landscape rising and falling, its knolls,
streams and bridle paths which ran between nowhere and nowhere; its wetness
underfoot, its scaly patches of late snow, and the tossing inland squall
that was its typical climate. In calm weather, its air was wandering,
miasmic, like memories that no one owns. When I was about ten years old,
children of my age began to disappear from the milltown conurbations and the
Manchester backstreets. It was in moorland that their bodies were found; one
at least is un-recovered. England had not thought there were places like
these: beyond the metropolitan imagination, out of range of compass and map.
The other way of being lost, when I was a child, was by being damned. Damned
to hell that is, for all eternity. This could happen very easily if you were
a Catholic child in the 1950s. If the speeding driver caught you at the
wrong moment - let us say, at the midpoint between monthly Confessions -
then your soul could part from your body in such a blackened state that you
would never see the face of God. Our school was situated handily, so as to
increase the risks, between two bends in the road. Last-moment repentance is
possible, and stress was placed on it. You might be saved if, in your final
welter of mashed bones and gore, you remembered the formula. So it was
really all a matter of timing. I didn’t think it might be a matter of mercy.
Mercy was a theory that I had not seen in operation. I had only seen how
those who wielded power extracted maximum advantage from every situation.
The politics of the playground and classroom are as instructive as those of
the parade-ground and the senate. I understood that, as Thucydides would
later tell me, “the strong exact what they can, and the weak yield what they
must”.
Accordingly, if the strong said “we are going to Birmingham”, to Birmingham
you must go. We were going to make a visit, to a family we had not met, and
in the days after the announcement I said the word “family” many times to
myself, its crumbly soft sound like a rusk in milk, and I carried its scent
with me, the human warmth of chequered blankets and the yeast smell of
babies’ heads. In the week before the visit, I went over in my head the
circumstances that surrounded it, challenged myself with a few
contradictions and puzzles which they threw up, and analysed who “us” might
be, because that was not a constant or a simple matter.
The night before the visit, I was sent to bed at eight, even though it was
the holidays and Saturday next day. I opened the sash window and leaned out
into the dusk, waiting till a lonely string of streetlights blossomed, far
over the fields, under the upland shadow. There was a sweet grassy
fragrance, a haze in the twilight; Dr Kildare’s Friday night theme tune
floated out from a hundred
TV sets, from a hundred open windows and doors, up the hill, across the
reservoir and over the moors, and as I fell asleep I saw the medics in their
frozen poses, fixed, solemn and glazed, like heroes on the curve of an
antique jar.
I once read of a jar on which this verse was engraved:
Straight is the line of duty;
Curved is the line of beauty.
Follow the straight line; thou shalt see
The curved line ever follow thee.
At five o’clock, a shout roused me from my dreams. I went downstairs in my
blue spotted pyjamas to wash in hot water from the kettle, and I saw the
outline of my face, puffy, in the light like grey linen tacked to the summer
window. I had never been so far from home; even my mother had never, she
said, been so far. I was excited and excitement made me sneeze. My mother
stood in the kitchen in the first uncertain shaft of sun, making sandwiches
with cold bacon and wrapping them silently, sacramentally, in grease-proof
paper.
We were going in Jack’s car, which stood the whole night, these last few
months, at the kerb outside our house. It was a small grey car, like a
jellymould, out of which a giant might turn a foul jelly of profanity and
grease. The car’s character was idle, vicious and sneaky. If it had been a
pony you would have shot it. Its engine fizzed most days and steamed, its
under-parts rattled; it wanted brake shoes and new exhausts. It jibbed at
hills and sputtered to a halt on bends. It ate oil and when it wanted a new
tyre there were rows about having no money, and slamming the doors so hard
that the glass of the kitchen cupboard rattled in its grooves.
The car brought out the worst in everybody who saw it. It was one of the
first cars on the street, and the neighbours, in their mistaken way, envied
it. Already sneerers and ill-wishers of ours, they were driven to further
spite when they saw us trooping out to the kerb carrying all the rugs and
kettles and camping stoves and raincoats and wellington boots that we took
with us for a day at the seaside or the zoo.
There were five of us , now. Me and my mother; two biting, snarling, pinching
little boys; Jack. My father did not go on our trips. Though he still slept
in the house - the room down the corridor, the one with the ghost - he kept
to his own timetables and routines, his Friday jazz club and his solitary
sessions of syncopation, picking at the piano, late weekend afternoons, with
a remote gaze.
This had not always been his way of life. He had once taken me to the library. He
had taken me out with my fishing net. He had taught me card games and how to
read a race-card; it might not have been a suitable accomplishment for an
eight-year-old, but any skill at all was a grace in our dumb old world.
But those days were now lost to me. Jack had come to stay with us. At first
he was just a visitor and then without transition he seemed to be always
there. He never carried in a bag, or unpacked clothes; he just came complete
as he was.
After his day’s work he would drive up in the evil car, and when he came up
the steps and through the front door, my father would melt away to his
shadowy evening pursuits. Jack had a brown skin and muscles beneath his
shirt. He was your definition of a man, if a man was what caused alarm and
shattered the peace. To amuse me while my mother combed the tangles out of
my hair, he told me the story of David and Goliath.
It was not a success. He tried his hardest, as I tried also, to batten down
my shrieks. As he spoke his voice slid in and out of the London intonations
with which he had been born; his brown eyes flickered, caramel and small, the
whites jaundiced. He made the voice of Goliath, but - to my mind - he was
lacking in the David department.
After a long half hour, it was over. My vast weight of hair studded to my
skull with steel clips, I pitched exhausted from my kitchen chair. Jack
stood up, equally exhausted, I suppose; he would not have known how often
this needed to happen. He liked children, or imagined he did. But owing to
recent events and my cast of mind, I was not exactly a child, and he himself
was a very young man, too inexperienced to navigate through the situation in
which he had placed himself, and he was always on the edge, under pressure,
chippy and paranoid and quick to take offence. I was afraid of his flaring
temper and his irrationality: he argued with brute objects, kicked out at
iron and wood, cursed the fire when it wouldn’t light. I flinched at the
sound of his voice, but I kept the flinch inwards. Nothing was readable on
my tiny features, except the traces of ineradicable contempt.
When I look back now I feel - insofar as I can read my feelings - a faint
stir of fellow-feeling that is on the way to pity. The writer Gail Godwin
says that “... behind every story that begins ‘When I was a child’ there
exists another story in which adults are fighting for their lives”.
It was Jack’s quickness of temper, and his passion for the underdog, that was
the cause of our trip to Birmingham. We were going to see a friend of his,
who was from Africa. You will remember that we have barely reached the year
1962, and I had never seen anyone from Africa, except in photographs, but
the prospect in itself was less amazing to me than the knowledge that Jack
had a friend. I thought friends were for children. My mother seemed to think
that you grew out of them. Adults did not have friends. They had relatives.
Only relatives came in your house. Neighbours might come, of course. But not
to our house. My mother was now the subject of scandal and did not go out.
We were all the subject of scandal, but some of us had to. I had to go to
school, for instance. It was the law.
It must have been six o’clock when we bundled into the car, the two little
boys dropped sleep-stunned beside me onto the red leather of the back seat.
In those days it took a very long time to get anywhere. There were no
motorways to speak of. Fingerposts were still employed, and we did not seem
to have the use of a map. Because my mother did not know left from right,
she would cry “That way, that way!” whenever she saw a sign and happened to
read it. The car would swerve off in any old direction and Jack would start
cursing and she would shout back. Our journeys usually found us bogged in
the sand at Southport, or broken down by the drystone wall of some
Derbyshire beauty spot, the lid of the vile spitting engine propped open, my
mother giving advice from the wound-down window; fearful advice, which went
on till Jack danced with rage on the roadway, on the uncertain sand, his
voice piping in imitation of a female shriek, and she, heaving up the last
rags of self-control, heaving them into her arms like some dying soprano’s
bouquet, would drop her voice an octave and claim “I don’t talk like that.”
But on this particular day, we didn’t get lost at all. It seemed a miracle.
At the blossoming hour of ten o’clock, the weather still fine, we ate our
sandwiches, and I remember that first sustaining bite of salted fat, sealing
itself in a plug to the hard palate; the sip of Nescafe to wash it down,
poured steaming from the flask. In some town we stopped for petrol. That too
passed without incident. I rehearsed, in my mind, the reason behind the
visit. The man from Africa, the friend, was not now but had once been a
workmate of Jack’s.
And they had spoken. And his name was Jacob. My mother had told me, don’t say
“Jacob is black” say “Jacob is coloured.” What, coloured? I said. What,
striped? Like the threadbare towel which, at that very moment, was hanging
to dry before the fire? I stared at it, washed to a patchy pink-grey. I felt
it; the fibres were stiff as dried grass. Black, my mother said, is not the
term polite people use. And stop mauling that towel.
So now, the friend, Jacob. He had married a white girl. They had gone to get
lodgings. They had been turned away. The stable door bolted. Though Eva was
expecting. Especially because she was expecting. NO COLOUREDS, the signs
said.
Oh, merrie England! At least people could spell in those days. They didn’t
write NO COLOURED’S or “NO” COLOUREDS. That’s about all you can say for it.
So: Jacob unfolded to Jack this predicament of his: no house, the insulting
notices, the pregnant Eva. Jack, quickly taking fire, wrote a letter to a
newspaper. The newspaper, quick to spot a cause, took fire also. There was
naming and shaming; there was a campaign. Letters were written and questions
were asked. The next thing you knew, Jacob had moved to Birmingham, to a new
job. There was a house now, a baby, indeed two. Better days were here. But
Jacob would never forget how Jack had taken up the cudgels. That, my mother
said, was the phrase he had used. David and Goliath, I thought. My scalp
prickled, and I felt steel pins cold against it. Last night had been too
busy for the combing. My hair fell smoothly down my back, but hidden above
the nape of my neck there was a secret pad of fuzziness which, if slept on
one more night, would require a howling hour to unknot.
The house of Jacob was built of brick in a quiet colour, with a white-painted
gate and a tree in a tub outside. One huge window stared out at a grass
verge, with a sapling; and the road curved away, lined with similar houses,
each in their own square of garden. We stepped out of the heat of the car
and stood jelly-legged on the verge. Behind the plate glass was a stir of
movement, and Jacob opened the front door to us, his face breaking into a
smile. He was a tall slender man, and I liked the contrast of his white
shirt with the soft sheen of his skin. I tried hard not to say, even to
think, the term that is not the one polite people use. Jacob, I said to
myself, is quite a dark lavender, verging on purple on an overcast day.
Eva came out from behind him. She had a compensatory pallor, and when she
reached out, vaguely patting at my little brothers, she did it with fingers
like rolled dough. Well, well, the adults said. And, this is all very nice. Lovely,
Eva. And fitted carpets. Yes, said Eva. And would you like to go and spend a
penny? I didn’t know this phrase. Wash your hands, my mother said. Eva said,
up you run, poppet. At the top of the stairs there was a bathroom, not an
arrangement I had reason to take for granted. Eva ushered me into it,
smiling, and clicked the door behind her. There was a bolt on it and I
thought for a moment of bolting myself in. Standing at the basin and
watching myself in the mirror, I washed my hands carefully with Camay soap.
Maybe I was dehydrated from the journey, for I didn’t seem to need to do
anything else. I hummed to myself, “You’ll look a little lovelier . . . each
day . . . with fabulous Camay.” I didn’t look around much. I dried carefully
between my fingers with the towel behind the door. Already I could hear them
on the stairs, shouting that it was their turn.
Everything had been fine, till the last hour of the journey. “Not long to
go”, my mother had said, and suddenly swivelled in her seat. She watched us,
silent, her neck craning. Then she said, “When we are visiting Jacob, don’t
say ‘Jack’.
It’s not suitable. I want you to say”, and here she began to struggle with her
words, “Daddy . . . Daddy Jack.”
Her head, once more, faced front. Studying the curve of her cheek, I thought
she looked sick. It had been a most unconvincing performance. I was almost
embarrassed for her. “Is this just for today?” I asked. My voice came out
cold.
She didn’t answer.
When I got back into the downstairs room they were parading Eva’s children, a
toddler and a baby, and remarking that it was funny how it came out, so you
had one butter-coloured and one blueish, and Jacob was saying, too, that it
was funny how it came out and you couldn’t ever tell, really, it was
probably beyond the scope of science as we know it today. The sound of a pan
rocking on the gas jet came from the kitchen, and there was a burst of wet
steam, and some clanking; Eva said carrots, can’t take your eye off them.
Wiping her hands on her apron, she made for the door and melted into the
steam. My eyes followed her. Jacob smiled and said, so how is the man who
took up the cudgels?
We children ate in the kitchen - us, that is, because the two babies sat in
their own high chairs by Eva and sucked gloop from a spoon. There was a
little red table with a hinged flap, and Eva propped the back door open so
that the sunlight from the garden came in. We had thick pale slices of roast
pork, and gravy that was beige and so thick it kept the shape of the knife.
Probably if I am honest about what I remember I think it is the fudge
texture of this gravy that stays in my mind, better even than the
afternoon’s choking panic, the tears and prayers that were now only an hour
or so away.
After our dinner Tabby came. She was not a cat but a girl, and the niece of
Jacob. Enquiries were made of me: did I like to draw? Tabby had brought a
large bag with her, and from it she withdrew sheets of rough coloured paper
and a whole set of coloured pencils, double-ended. She gave me a quick,
modest smile, and a flicker of her eyes. We settled down in a corner, and
began to make each other’s portrait.
Out in the garden the little boys grubbed up worms, shrieked, rolled the lawn
with each other and laid about them with their fists. I thought that the two
coloured babies, now snorting in milky sleep, would be doing the same thing
before long. When one of the boys fetched the other a harder clout than
usual, the victim would howl “Jack! Jack!”
My mother stood looking over the garden. “That’s a lovely shrub, Eva”, she
said. I could see her through the angle made by the open door of the
kitchen; her high-heeled sandals planted four-square on the lino. She was
smaller than I had thought, when I saw her beside the floury bulk of Eva,
and her eyes were resting on something further than the shrub: on the day
when she would leave the moorland village behind her, and have a shrub of
her own. I bent my head over the paper and attempted the blurred line of
Tabby’s cheek, the angle of neck to chin. The curve of flesh, its soft
bloom, eluded me; I lolled my pencil point softly against the paper, feeling
I wanted to roll it in cream, or in something vegetable-soft but tensile,
like the the fallen petal of a rose. I had already noticed, with interest,
that Tabby’s crayons were sharpened down in a similar pattern to the ones I
had at home. There was little call for gravy colour and even less for
bl...k. Most popular with her was gold/green: as with me. Least popular:
morbid mauve/dark pink. Those days when I gave up crayoning, and started to
play that the crayons were soldiers, I had to imagine that gold/green was a
drummer boy, so short was he.
My pencil snagged. This paper is for kids, I thought. An obscure insult,
trailing like the smell of old vegetable water, seemed to hang in the air.
My fingers clenched. Fired by a spurt of rage, my wrist stiffening, I ripped
into the paper. My pencil, held like a dagger, tore at its surface. At my
toppest speed, I began to execute cartoon men, with straight jointless
limbs, with blown “O”s for heads, with wide grinning mouths, jug ears; petty
Goliaths with slatted mouths, with five fingerbones splaying from their
wrists. Tabby looked up. Shh, shh . . . she said; as if soothing me. I drew
children rolling in the grass, children made of two circles with a third “O”
for their bawling mouths.
Jacob came in, laughing, talking over his shoulder, “. . . so I tell him, if
you want a trained draughtman for £6 a week, man, you can whistle for him!”
I thought, I won’t call him anything, I won’t give him a name. I’ll nod my
head in his direction so they’ll know who I mean. I’ll even point to him,
though polite people don’t point. Daddy Jack! Daddy Jack! They can whistle
for him!
Jacob stood over us, smiling softly. The crisp turn of his collar, the top
button released, disclosed his velvet quite dark-coloured throat. “Two nice
girls”, he said. “What have we here?” He picked up my paper. “Talent!” he
said.
“Did you do this, sweetheart, by yourself?” He was looking at the cartoon men,
not my portrait of Tabby, those tentative strokes in the corner of the page:
not the curve of
her jaw, like a note in music. “Hey, Jack”, he said, “now this is good, I
can’t believe it at her young age.” I whispered “I am nine”, as if I wanted
to alert him to the true state of affairs. Jacob waved the paper around,
delighted. “I could well say this is a prodigy”, he said. I turned my face
away. It seemed indecent to look at him. In that one moment it seemed to me
that the world was blighted, and that every adult throat bubbled, like a
garbage pail in August, with the syrup of rotting lies.
I see them, now, from the car window, children any day, on any road; children
going somewhere, disconnected from the routes of adult intent. You see them
in trios or pairs, in unlikely combinations, sometimes a pair with a little
one tagging along, sometimes a boy with two girls. They carry, it might be,
a plastic bag with something secret inside, or a stick or box, but no
obvious plaything; sometimes a ratty dog processes behind them. Their faces
are intent and their missions hidden from adult eyes; they have a geography
of their own, urban or rural, that has nothing to do with the milestones and
markers that adults use. The country through which they move is older, more
intimate than ours. They have their private knowledge of it. You do not
expect this knowledge to fail.
There was no need to ask if we were best friends, me and Tabby, as we walked
the narrow muddy path by the water. Perhaps it was a canal, but a canal was
not a thing I’d seen, and it seemed to me more like a placid inland stream,
silver-grey in colour, tideless not motionless, fringed by sedge and tall
grasses. My fingers were safely held in the pad of Tabby’s palm, and there
was a curve of light on the narrow, coffee-coloured back of her hand. She
was a head taller than me, willowy, cool to the touch, even at the hot end
of this hot afternoon. She was ten and a quarter years old, she said, almost
as if it were something to shrug away. In her free hand she held a paper
bag, and in this bag - which she had taken from her satchel, her eyes
modestly downcast - were ripe plums.
They were - in their perfect dumpling under my finger tips, in their cold
purple blush - so fleshy that to notch your teeth against their skin seemed
like becoming a tea-time cannibal, a vampire for the day. I carried my plum
in my palm, caressing it, rolling it like a dispossessed eye, and feeling it
grow warm from the heat of my skin. We strolled, so; till Tabby pulled at my
hand, stopped me, and turned me towards her, as if she wanted a witness. She
clenched her hand. She rolled the dark fruit in her fist, her eyes on mine.
She raised her fist to her sepia mouth. Her small teeth plunged into ripe
flesh. Juice ran down her chin. Casually she wiped it. She turned her face
full to mine, and for the first time I saw her frank smile, her lips parted,
the gap between her teeth at the front. She flipped my wrist lightly, with
the back of her fingers; I felt the sting of her nails. “Let’s go on the
wrecks”, she said.
It meant we must scramble through a fence. Through a gap there. I knew it was
illicit. I knew no would be said but then what, this afternoon, did I care
for no? Under the wire, through the snag of it, the gap already widened by
the hands of forerunners, some of whom must have worn double-thickness
woollen double-knit mittens, to muffle the scratch against their flesh. Once
through the wire, Tabby went, “Whoop!”
Then soon she was bouncing, dancing in the realm of the dead cars. They were
above our head to the height of three. Her hands reached out to flip at
their rusting door-sills and wings. If there had been glass in their
windows, it was strewn now at our feet. Scrapes of car-paint showed, fawn,
banana, a degraded scarlet. I was giddy, and punched my fingers at metal; it
crumbled, I was through it. For that moment only I may have laughed; but I
do not think so.
She led me on the paths to the heart of the wrecks. We play here, she said,
and towed me on. We stopped for a plum each. We laughed. “Are you too young
to write a letter?” she asked. I did not answer. “Have you heard of
penfriends? I have one already.”
All around us, the scrap-yard showed its bones. The wrecks stood clear now,
stack on stack, against a declining yellow light. When I looked up they
seemed to foreshorten, these carcasses, and bear down on me; gaping windows
where faces looked out once, empty engine cavities where the air was blue,
treadless tyres, wheel arches gaping, boots unsprung and empty of bags,
unravelling springs where seats were once; and some wrecks were warped,
reduced, as if by fire, bl...kened. We walked, sombre, cheeks bulging, down
the paths between. When we had penetrated, many rows in, by blind corners,
by the swerves enforced on us by the squishy corrosion of the sliding piles,
I wanted to ask, why do you play here and who is you , and also can we go
now please?
Tabby ducked out of sight, around some rotting heap. I heard her giggle. “Got
you!” I said. “Yes!” She ducked, shying away, but my plum stone hit her
square on the temple, and as it touched her flesh I tasted the seducing
poison which, if you crack a plum stone, your tongue can taste. Then Tabby
broke into a trot, and I chased her: when she skidded to a halt, her flat
brown sandals making brakes for her, I stopped too, and glanced up, and saw
we had come to a place where I could hardly see the sky. Have a plum, she
said. She held the bag out. I am lost, she said. We are, we are, lost. I’m
afraid to say.
What came next I cannot, you understand, describe in clock-time. I have never
been lost since, not utterly lost, without the sanctuary of sense; without
the reasonable hope that I will and can and deserve to be saved. But for
that next buried hour, we ran like rabbits, pile to pile, scrap to scrap,
the wrecks that had become our total world towering, as we went deeper, for
twenty feet above our heads. I could not blame her. I did not. But I did not
see how I could help us either. If it had been the moors, some ancestral
virtue would have propelled me, I felt, towards the metalled road, towards a
stream bed or cloud that would have conveyed me, soaked and beaten, towards
the A57, towards the sanctity of some strangers’ car; and the wet inner
breath of that vehicle would have felt to me, whoever owned it, like the wet
protective breathing of the belly of the whale.
But here, there was nothing alive. There was nothing I could do, for there
was nothing natural. The metal stretched, friable, bl...k, against evening
light. We shall have to live on plums for ever, I thought. For I had the
sense to realise that the only excursion here would be from the wreckers’
ball. No flesh would be sought here; there would be no rescue team. When
Tabby reached for my hand, her fingertips were cold as ball-bearings. Once,
she heard people calling. Men’s voices. She said she did. I heard only
distant, formless shouts. They are calling our names, she said. Jacob, Jack.
They are calling for us.
She began to move, for the first time, in a purposive direction. In her eyes
was that shifty light of unconviction, that I had seen on my mother’s face -
could it be only this morning? A scalding pair of tears popped into my eyes.
To know that I lived, I touched the knotted mass of hair, the secret above
my nape: my fingers rubbed and rubbed it, round and round. If I survived, it
would have to be combed out, with torture. This seemed to militate against
life; and then I felt, for the first time and not the last, that death at
least is straightforward. Tabby stopped, her breath tight and short, and
held out to me the last plum stone, the kernel, sucked clear of flesh. I
took it without disgust from her hand. Tabby’s troubled eyes looked at it.
It sat in my palm, a shrivelled brain from some small animal. Tabby leaned
forward. She was still breathing hard. The edge of her littlest nail picked
at the convolutions. She put her hand against her ribs. She said, “It is the
map of the world.”
There was an interval of praying. I will not disguise it. It was she who
raised the prospect. “I know a prayer”, she said. I waited. “Little Jesus,
meek and mild . . . .” I said “What’s the good of praying to a baby?”
She threw her head back. Her nostrils flared. Prayers began to run out of
her. “Now I lay me down to sleep . . . .”
Stop, I said. “If I should die before I wake . . . .”
My fist, before I even knew it, clipped her across the mouth.
After a time, she raised her hand there. Her fingers trembled against the
corner of her lip, the crushed flesh like velvet, creeping it down for a
moment so that the darker membrane showed. There was no blood. I said,
“Aren’t you going to cry?” She said, “Are you?” I couldn’t say, I never cry.
It was not true. She knew it. She said softly, it is all right if you want
to cry. Don’t you know a Catholic prayer?
Hail Mary. I said. She said, Teach it me. And I could see why, because the
sun lay in angry streaks across farther peaks of the junk yard. “Don’t you
have a watch?” she whispered. “I have one, but it is at home, in my
bedroom.” I said, I have a watch it is Westclox, but I am not allowed to
wind it, it is only to be wound by Jack. I wanted to say, and often he is
tired, it is late, my watch is winding down, it is stopping but I dare not
ask, and when next day it’s stopped there’s bellowing, only I can do a
bleeding thing in this bleeding house. (Door slam.)
There is a certain prayer which never fails. It is to St Bernard; or by him,
I was never quite clear. Remember oh most loving, further adjectives, mother
of god/virgin etc, that it is a thing unheard of that anyone ever ,
beseeched thy aid, sought thy intercession or implored thy help and was left
forsaken. I thought that I had it, close enough, the beseech and besought of
it; could a few errors matter, when you were kicking at the Immaculate’s
gate? I was ready to implore: and it was the most powerful prayer ever
invented. It was a clear declaration that heaven must help you or go to
hell. It was a taunt, a challenge, to Holy Mary Mother Of God. Get it fixed!
Do it now! It is a thing unheard of! But just as I was about to begin, I
realised I must not say it after all. Because if it didn’t work . . . .
The strength seemed to drain away then, from my arms and legs. I sat down, in
the deep shadow of the wrecks, when all the indications were that we should
keep climbing. I wasn’t about to take a bet on St Bernard’s prayer, and live
my life knowing it was useless. I must have thought there were worse
circumstances, in which I’d need to deal this last card from my sleeve.
“Climb!” said Tabby. I climbed. I knew - did she? - that the rust might
crumble beneath us and drop us into the heart of the wrecks. Climb, she
said, and I did: each step tested, so that I learned the resistance of
rotting metal, the play and the give beneath my feet, the pathetic cough and
wheeze of it, its abandonment and ferrous despair. Tabby climbed. Her feet
scurried, light, skipping, the soles of her sandals skittering and
scratching like rats. And then, like stout Cortez, she stopped, stared. “The
woodpiles!” I gazed upwards into her face. She swayed and teetered, six feet
above me. Evening breeze whipped her skirt around her stick-legs. “The
woodpiles!” Her face opened like a flower.
What she said meant nothing to me, but I understood the message. We are out!
she cried. Her arm beckoned me. Come on, come on! She was shouting at me,
but I was crying too hard to hear. I worked myself up beside her: crab arms,
crab legs, two steps sideways for every step forward. She reached down and
scooped at my arm, hauling rne up beside her. I shook myself free. I pulled
out the stretched sleeve of my cardigan, eased the shape into the wool, and
slid it back past my wrist. I saw the light on the still body of water, and
the small muddy path that had brought us there.
“Well, you girls”, Jacob said, “don’t you know we came calling? Didn’t you
hear us?”
Well, suppose I did, I thought. Suppose she was right. I can just hear
myself, can’t you, bawling, here, Daddy Jack, here I am. It was seven
o’clock. They had been composing sandwiches and Jacob had been for ice cream
and wafers. Though missed, we had never been a crisis. The main point was
that we should be there for the right food at the right time.
The little boys slept on the way home, and I suppose so did I. The next day,
next week, next months are lost to me. It startles me now that I can’t
imagine how I said goodbye to Tabby, and that I can’t even remember at what
point in the evening she melted away, her crayons in her satchel and her
memories in her head. Somehow, with good fortune on our side, my family must
have rolled home; and it would be another few years before we ventured so
far again.
Lost, is not now a major capacity of mine. I don’t generally have to resort
to that covert shuffle whereby some women turn the map upside down to count
off the junctions. They say that females can’t read maps and never know
where they are, but recently the Ordnance Survey has appointed its first
woman director, so that particular slander loses its force. I married a man
who casts a professional eye on the lie of the land, and would prefer me to
direct with references to tumuli, streambeds and ancient monuments. But a
finger tracing the major routes is enough for me, and I just say nervously,
“We are about two miles from our turn-off or maybe, of course, we are not.”
They are always tearing up the contour lines, ploughing under the map,
playing hell with the cartography that last year you were sold as le dernier
cri . As for the moorland landscape, I have turned my back on it, knowing
that it was just an accident that I was born there, that I have no affinity
with its bleakness. At least one of those pinching little boys in the back
seat shares my appreciation of wildflower verges and lush arable acres. And
in recent years, since Jack has been wandering in the country of the dead, I
see again his brown skin, his roving caramel eyes, his fretting rage against
power and its abuses: and I think perhaps that he was lost all his life, and
looking for a house of justice, a place of safety to take him in.
In the short term, though, we continued to live in one of those houses where
there was never any money, and doors were slammed hard. One day the glass
did spring out of the kitchen cupboard, at the touch of my fingertips. At
once I threw my hands up, to protect my eyes. Between my fingers, for some
years, you could see the delicate scars, like the ghosts of lace gloves,
that the cuts left behind.